Asana is useful when client work is happening in parallel and chat is pretending to be a project plan. A small studio needs ownership, dates, and a definition of done more than it needs a portfolio management suite.
What it should hold
Hold the project: owner, scope, milestones, and the next action. Review planned versus actual effort while there is still time to change the outcome. Harvest can sit beside it when you need hours for pricing, not just tasks for delivery.
Do not hold strategy essays, brand guidelines, or the company wiki. That is Notion or a shared drive. Mixing them is how both tools rot.
Who it is for
Studios of roughly five to twenty people, running more than one live project, will feel the benefit. A two-person shop can stay with a simpler list until the list stops being honest.
The operating habits still matter more than the software. Use the independent agency operating system to decide what “a project” must include before you configure fields. More on this topic: Operations and Tools.